But now Quentin was on the inside, and she was out here chainsmoking on the Gowanus boat dock with her half-orc boyfriend. Quentin had passed the test, and she’d failed. It seemed that reason and intelligence weren’t getting it done anymore. They were cutting, like, zero ice.

It was when Quentin left that day that Julia really fell off a cliff.

It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world.

The shrink they sent her to diagnosed her more specifically with dysthymia, which he defined as an inability to enjoy things that she should be enjoying. Which she recognized the justice of, since she enjoyed nothing, though there was a world of space inside that “should” that a dysthymic semiotician could have argued with, if she had had the energy. Because there was something she did enjoy, or would enjoy, whether or not she should. She just had no access to it. That thing was magic.

The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you’d fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.

She printed out the first verse of a Donne poem and stuck it on her door:

The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Apparently semicolons were the hot new thing in the seventeenth century.

But otherwise it was a pretty good summary of her state of mind. Hydroptic: it meant thirsty. The thirsty earth. The sap had sunk out of the thirsty world, leaving behind a dried husk that weighed nothing, a dead thing that crumbled if you touched it.

Once a week her mother asked her if she’d been raped. Maybe it would have been simpler if she said yes. Her family had never really understood her. They’d always lived in fear of her rapacious intellect. Her sister, a timorous, defiantly unmathematical brunette four years younger, tiptoed around her as if she were a wild animal who would snap rabidly if provoked. No sudden movements. Keep your fingers outside the cage.

As a matter of fact she did consider insanity as a possible diagnosis. She had to. What sane person (ha!) wouldn’t? She definitely looked crazier than she used to. She’d picked up some bad habits, like picking at her cuticles, and not showering, and for that matter not eating or leaving her room for days at a time. Clearly—Doctor Julia explained to herself—she was suffering from some kind of Harry Potter–induced hallucination, with paranoid overtones, most likely schizophrenic in origin.